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Patterns of carbon footprints of main grains production in China: a comparison between main and non-main producing areas

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Abstract

Understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of carbon footprints (CFs) of grains production is important to formulate regional heterogeneous greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategies. This study evaluates the CFs, farm CFs (FCFs: CFs of per unit area), and production CFs (PCFs: CFs of per unit yield) of main grains production in China based on a new scale data set: agricultural statistics data of over 300 prefecture-level regions. A comparison of CFs of main grains production between main producing area (MPA) and non-main producing area (NMPA) are firstly discussed on a totally new scale. Results show that the CFs of main grains production of MPA accounts for 54–57% of country’s total although the area of farmland of MPA only accounts for 42%. The PCF and FCF of rice production are higher in MPA, while those of wheat and maize production are lower in MPA. It implies that there are less GHG emission of rice (main paddy grain) productions in NMPA and less GHG emission of wheat and maize (main dryland grains) production in MPA. In additional, the PCF of rice shows growth, while that of wheat and maize shows decline from 2008 to 2017. The growth of PCF of rice is mainly driven by the rise of PCF in MPA. Findings are expected to improve the understanding patterns of China’s CF of main grains production and subsequently contribute to GHG mitigation.

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Funding

This study was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFC0507800), Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41890824), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA20040301), and the CAS Interdisciplinary Innovation Team (Grant No. JCTD-2019-04).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Blue and Green Development, Shandong University, Weihai, 264209, China

    Peipei Tian

  2. Key Laboratory of Water Cycle and Related Land Surface Process, Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100101, China

    Peipei Tian, Hongwei Lu & Yuxuan Xue

  3. Department of Operations Analytics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Peipei Tian & Reinout Heijungs

  4. Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, 2311 EZ, Leiden, Netherlands

    Reinout Heijungs

  5. State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Dan Li

  6. College of the Environment and Ecology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361104, China

    Yiyang Yang

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  1. Peipei Tian
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  2. Hongwei Lu
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  3. Reinout Heijungs
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  4. Dan Li
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  5. Yuxuan Xue
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Contributions

Peipei Tian: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing—Original draft preparation; Hongwei Lu: Validation, Supervision; Reinout Heijungs: Methodology, Supervision; Dan Li: Visualization; Yuxuan Xue: Data curation, Software; Yiyang Yang: Data curation.

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Correspondence to Hongwei Lu.

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Tian, P., Lu, H., Heijungs, R. et al. Patterns of carbon footprints of main grains production in China: a comparison between main and non-main producing areas. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 23595–23606 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17404-7

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